We all know his faults.

If you can’t figure them out on your own, late-night comics, the hosts on The View or your Facebook friends will enumerate them for you, punctuating it all with a good many exclamation points and some virtual flying spittle.

Mormons who like Jeff Flake will question your decency if you support him.

They must not have had a dad like mine, an LDS farmer who did business with his cigar-chomping, booze-pouring, Sabbath-breaking, possibly wife-abandoning fellow citizens. He sold them his eggs because he didn’t have anyone else to sell to. He got along with them, following all the rules of his religion without demanding that they follow them, too. In fact, he once admitted that an occasional rule-breaker thrown into the mix actually does some good, accomplishing what the straitlaced can’t. (Except for Mayor Pasley. Mention Mayor Pasley and his face twitched like a cat getting its whiskers yanked.)

Victor Davis Hanson offers the same take on human nature in his book, The Case for Trump. He discusses why Trump won in 2016, how he’s governed, what the alternatives were, and how he compares with other presidents. Rather than make a vain attempt to explain things better than Hanson, I’m just going to send you his way.

Now, why should you listen to some guy named Victor Davis Hanson?

1) He’s a professor, and at Stanford. No mean feat that.

2) He’s a prolific author. I didn’t get far into my habit of reading op-eds or book reviews pages before I started seeing his name again and again. Check out his oeuvre on Amazon; unlike a lot of newsy/academic books, his go down easy. And I never pick up a hint of showing off.

3) His specialty is The Classics, as in the Greeks, the Romans, the Spartans, Trojans and the rest. This gives Hanson a long view of history and human behavior. When the rest of us freak out and tell ourselves, Oh, man, I don’t know how we’re gonna get through this one, Hanson summons similar crises from long ago, showing that we really haven’t change that much.

4) He’s a farmer. Davis still resides in the home where he grew up, tending to the land (fifth generation by now). I grew up on a farm, too, and even though I gladly got away, I recognize the valuable worldview that seeped into my veins. There’s a social cost to the switch from the tyranny of daily milking to a salaried, suburban predictability. Says Davis of our era:

The majority of Americans no longer worked with their hands, grew food, or built things, and many were paid quite handsomely to avoid such drudgery. But the result for society at large in terms of lawmaking, education, and social planning was that abstraction ruled over practicality. Nature remained theoretical and deified rather than concrete and thus sometimes feared.

Cue the “Some of you never had to pick your own willow switch, and it shows” memes.

5) Finally, his voice is soothing.

At any rate, Davis has done his homework, gotten the PhD, written enough to earn name recognition, but retained sufficient common sense to not insist an almond tree act like a rosebush.

He’s a rare package, and he’s worth your attention.

So, unless you’ve already plunked your ballot into the mailbox, there’s still time to read The Case for Trump, as well as Davis’ assessment of the likely outcomes of a Joe Biden presidency. Also, Davis finished Case in 2018 and, as we all know, a lot has happened in the two ensuing years (that feel like twelve). Would Davis write a different book today? You can judge for yourself by watching a recent speech here.